Orkut State Censorship

Orkut was very popular in Iran, but the website is now blocked by the government. As they say, this is due to national security issues, as Orkut users have the ability to spread messages rapidly, but the government says it's due to Islamic ethical issues about dating and match making. To get around this block, sites such as orkutproxy.com (now defunct) were made for Iranian users. Other websites such as Yahoo! Groups and Google Groups have communities dedicated to receiving updates on the newest location of Iran's Orkut proxy. Though it was once possible to bypass governmental blockage of Orkut, the site has closed its HTTPS pages on all anonymous proxies. Now it is almost impossible for ordinary users to visit this site inside Iran. Also many sites have been published since Orkut's blockade in Iran following the same path such as MyPardis, Cloob or Banhaneh. Of course these websites deal with a high degree of risk to get filtered too, so they have their own censorship policies to meet Iran's un-written regulations and rules of filtering.

In August 2006, United Arab Emirates followed the footsteps of Iran in blocking the site. This block was subsequently removed in October 2006. On July 3, 2007, Gulf News revisited the issue, publishing complaints from members of the public against Orkut communities like "Dubai Sex", and officially bringing the complaints to the attention of the state telecom monopoly Etisalat [3]. The ensuing moral panic resulted in a renewed ban of the site by Etisalat by July 4, 2007 [4], still in effect despite Google's promise to negotiate the ban with the UAE [5]. Saudi Arabia is another country that has blocked access to Orkut, while Bahrain's information ministry is also under pressure to follow suit. Next